


At the Edge of the Sea

by rainsonata



Category: Elsword (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-18 11:09:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28617099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainsonata/pseuds/rainsonata
Summary: Finding himself at the beach again, Add comes to learn that he is not the only one in the water.  Merman AU.
Relationships: Edward "Add" Grenore/Edward "Add" Grenore, Lunatic Psyker/Mastermind, Mastermind/Lunatic Psyker
Kudos: 3





	At the Edge of the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr. Birthday fic for a friend.

The salty air kissed his lips, the winds blowing his long hair over when he turned to see how far from shore he was. Water came up to his thighs and the sun was hidden among a few stray clouds, waves crashing over his chest until he gave up twisting his shirt in a fatal attempt to avoid getting completely drenched. His hands were becoming numb the longer he pulled them underneath the waves in search for something. 

It was spring, but not warm enough to attract the seasonal tourists flocking over to the ocean and beach towns surrounding it. Sea birds made themselves at home and slept on the white sand beneath the gray skies. A couple sat together underneath an umbrella with their heads leaning close, an elderly man moved his charcoaled fingers nimbly over a sketchbook, a child waddled over to the seafoam and stopped in amazement when they disappeared. 

Add shivered standing in the freezing water for what felt like an hour, tightening the hair band that held his hair into a ponytail, almost laughing at his situation for all its worth. It should have been here. They fell into the water where he sat to eat lunch, on a little cliff hanging over the shallows. Praying that the waves didn’t wash it away, he felt foolish dipping his arm again before pulling out yet another handful of tiny sea shells. It happened so quickly that he didn’t realize his glasses were gone until he reached to adjust them. 

Water now went up to the upper part of his chest before he realized he had been walking outward to the sea instead of back to the shore. Even with his hair up, it cascaded down his back and into the water. Glancing to where the shore was, he half swam half ran back when he bumped into something. 

Oof!

It couldn’t be a rock or coral reef, he thought numbly and rubbed his knee to see there was no blood. He pulled his head underwater, but purple and white blurred past his eyes. Bringing his head back to the surface, Add gasped for air, closing his eyes and felt the wind picking up strands of his hair. He turned to swim back, but stopped when he saw that he wasn’t alone. 

Treading almost next to him was a man with his head sticking out of the water. His hair was the same color as his, bangs covering the right side of his face and stuck out in different directions like a porcupine despite being wet. He had pointed ears that reminded him of the elves from old storybooks he grew up reading. 

“Who are you?” Add demanded, although his voice shook when he asked. He wasn’t expecting to see anyone swim as far as he did. 

Magenta eyes stared at him - they held an unnatural spark as though glowing. Something at the back of his mind nagged something was off, but he shook them off. If the guy was a bother, he could always contact the police or have someone help him out. 

“I’m Lusa,” he said with a strange smile and echoed. “Who are you?” 

Add frowned at his question being tossed back. The way the other talked rang with an unfamiliar dialect. Perhaps that explained why he was paler than the locals. Was it okay for him to be out in the ocean without sunblock? Assuming that the guy was a foreigner who booked a cheap trip in the wrong time of the year, Add decided to humor him.

“A mermaid,” Add joked. “What are you doing out here?”

“Out here?” Lusa looked confused. “What’s wrong with that?”

Oh, he was one of those swimmers, the ones that ignored the signs and ventured further than he was supposed to. Then again, Add wasn’t any wiser swimming out on his own, not even wearing the proper clothes. He took a step back to get a better view of the man, who looked to be around the same height as him, if not taller. Unlike the long haired man, Lusa wasn’t shivering and looked more at home than he did in the freezing water.

“Aren’t you cold?” Add asked. “You’ll catch a cold if you stay here too long.”

“I never get sick,” he smiled to reveal a set of canine teeth. 

What a weird guy, Add stared at the smiling fool. What was he doing trying to impress him with a statement like that? Well, there are worse responses than that, so he didn’t let it bother him and shook it off.

“What are you doing?” Lusa asked, “You’ve been swimming around and going nowhere.”

Realization dawned upon Add. Blood rushed up to his face and dusted his cheeks red, looking down in a mix of anger and embarrassment. He’s been watched. 

“None of your business,” Add snapped, but felt guilty when Lusa made a hurt expression. “There’s no point, I’m going back.” 

“Wait,” he swam over to block his path with his arms spread out. “I can help, please?”

The way he looked at Add with widened eyes, his face lit up when he pleaded with the eagerness of a child. His body was submerged, but his arms looked well built with defined muscles that gleamed under the sunlight. 

Add backtracked on that thought. Gleam? It was endearing for the stranger to be concerned about him, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to accept the help. He hesitated and mumbled. “I lost my glasses.” 

“What does it look like?”

He gave Lusa a funny look. If he knew any better, he would have thought the guy wasn’t joking and genuinely didn’t know what glasses were. 

“They’re made of a metal and plastic,” Add gestured made two letter O’s with his hands and placed them over his eyes. “They’re black and silver.” 

“Oh, you call them glasses!” Lusa’s eyes lit up in realization and nodded in understanding, “I know what that is.” He seemed pleased with himself. 

“Really? I mean, great.” Add stopped himself from sounding too excited or relieved. 

He beamed, “This won’t take long!”

With a loud splash, Lusa propelled himself backwards and plunging head-first into the water to curl himself into a ball. As he flipped away, something stuck out of the water, a dorsal fin? It disappeared along with a shark tail that splashed out of the water, lined with extra fins on the side and black outlines around the edges. 

The tail disappeared into the water as Add held back his breath with widened eyes. He paddled around the shallows searching the surface for where Lusa had disappeared. A long shadow moved through the waves, but didn’t approach him until minutes later with his glasses. 

“I found them!” Lusa grinned. “Is this what it looks like?”

“Y-yeah,” Add breathed. 

Much to his relief, there were no scratches on the lens when he inspected his glasses. He tried wiping them with his shirt, only to be reminded that they were wet, a futile attempt. When he put them back on, the dorsal fin sticking out from Lusa’s back and the tail became clear in the shallow water. Add frowned. 

The other looked at him with worry, eyebrows scrunched up. “Did something happen?” 

“You have a tail!” Was all Add could muster. Oh gods…they were real. It wasn’t his shitty vision messing with him. 

Lusa cocked his head to the side, “Yes? Like any reasonable animal?”

“You’re a fish,” Add gaped at the fins. 

Now that Lusa was up close, he saw the gills running down the man’s neck and the fins on his arms. The purple blur he saw earlier must have been Lusa swimming nearby. People like him weren’t supposed to be real. They were myths, fairytales parents read to their children before bed. Lusa wasn’t human. 

“Shark,” Lusa corrected. “And what’s wrong with that? Aren’t you a mermaid?” 

Alarm appeared on Add’s features in shock. He stuck out his leg to show his kneecap and feet to the merman? Shark man? Wiggling his toes, he brought his foot back down with a small huff.

“You have feet!” Lusa gasped, “You’re human?” 

It was Lusa’s turn to be flustered, scratching the back of his neck and flabbergasted. He bit his lips, turning his body to the side as if embarrassed before he mumbled, “You look like a mermaid from the back.” 

“You thought I was a woman?”

“It’s the hair!” Lusa threw his arms up in exasperation. 

Add tugged on a loose strand of his long hair and scowled. He couldn’t tell if he should have been flattered or insulted being compared to a mermaid of all things. “Is that why you’re here? You thought I was a woman?”

“No! Well… maybe.” The shark man pouted and looked away, “If you’re human, isn’t this a bad time for you to swim? Why are you here?”

“I like coming here when there aren’t a lot of people around.”

The busy crowds occupying the town during summer gave him headaches and the trouble he took to walk or drive elsewhere didn’t help. Winters and springs were easier to manage. No naive tourists asking him where the ice cream shops were or if it was true that the beach houses were haunted. Best of all, he didn’t have to worry about leaving his stuff out at the beach if he wanted to grab something. 

“My stuff!” Add remembered his phone lying with the rest of his stuff on the cliff, “I need to go back.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t come here if you keep losing stuff,” Lusa commented.

“This is the only time it happened!” Add pouted when the other laughed. 

“You’re funny,” he grinned. “I like you.” 

Add closed his eyes. He got teased and complimented by a guy with gills for lungs and a set of fins. The other’s laughter was loud, but there was no hint of mockery in it. He was unsure how to feel about being liked by someone he just met. 

“I can’t climb,” Add gasped when they reached over to the base of where he left his stuff. It was a low cliff, maybe a few feet above the water, but could he really bring himself up? 

“Here, I’ll help.” 

Add squeaked in surprise when Lusa grabbed him by the arms, bringing him above the water until he was close enough to grab hold of the edge of the cliff. Using his upper body, he pushed himself up the rocks, hugging the edge and clawing over the cliff with legs dangling. He grunted at the discomfort of pebbles getting into his clothes and how rough the rock felt as it scraped his skin. 

It felt like someone took a cold blade from an ice cooler and placed it against his skin. His clothes clung to his sandy body as the sea breeze swept his hair when he overheard Lusa laughing at him. 

“Thanks for the lift,” Add said sarcastically and blew his bangs over. 

Lusa grinned, “Any time.” He climbed up to join Add, his upper body perched on the rock with his tail dangling off the cliff. Now that he was up close, it was evident to why the shark man had no trouble lifting him. Broad shouldered and lean, most of his weight was in his upper body with a long purple and gray tail. He really wasn’t human. Add wondered if his tail was as rubbery or smooth as it looked. 

“So what are grasses for? Gu-lass-is.” Lusa struggled to say the unfamiliar word. 

“They’re for seeing things.” Add grabbed a bag of tissues from his bag to wipe his glasses before trying them out, only to see that the glass had become smudged. “Some people can’t see without them.”

“Is that why you bumped into me?” 

“You were the one swimming into me!” Add turned pink and tried to change the topic, “What do you eat? Seals?”

“Seals?” Lusa made a face, “They’re full of fat and taste gross. Is that what humans eat?”

“Well, I guess some people eat them,” Add shrugged. “But most eat stuff like fish and rice?”

“I like fish too! You come by here a lot? We should have lunch together sometime.” If he had legs, Add was positive the man would have been bouncing in his seat- um, rock.

“Sometimes,” Add admitted. Not often enough, but he always found a way to squeeze in time between his classes and internship. Sitting by the rocks with his hands in the sand soothed his mind after a hard day. “I can come by when I’m free.” 

“That’s great!” Lusa exclaimed. 

Add chuckled, it was hard not to when the other was doing the same. Lusa’s laughs were infectious. Their conversation couldn’t have been longer than a few minutes, but he thought Lusa wasn’t a bad merman, although he was energetic and naive about how humans were. Taking one last look before leaving, he saw Lusa’s silhouette lying still on the cliff with his stomach on the floor and his head lying to the side. What a strange person. Well, even if he wasn’t human, the way he looked at Add made it hard to believe that. 

* * *

**Omake**

“So that’s what humans eat,” Lusa was impressed when he saw the sandwich.

“You want some?” Add tore off a corner to offer to the shark man. 

Lusa gingerly held the piece of bread with bits of meat and lettuce in between before taking a big bite. He moved his tongue around as he chewed, a weird expression formed when he tasted the foreign food and nodded with satisfaction. He seemed to have already gotten over Add rejecting his food, which was a freshly killed mojarra. Watching Lusa chew through the fish and bones left Add thankful that the man wasn’t a bull shark or a great white.

“Are there others like you?” Add asked.

“Oh, yeah.” Lusa listed, “Shark, dolphin, octopus, angler fish…”

A black blob with something glowing coming out of its head bursted out of the water. Claws and sharp teeth snarled at Add and made the college student scream. It had a long tail similar to Lusa, but paler skin like it wasn’t used to seeing sunlight, wiping black muck off with one hand to reveal the face of a young man. 

“DEMON FISH!” Add yelped, scooting back from the cliff’s edge. 

“You called?” The newcomer waved a clawed hand and smiled to show off a row of sharp teeth. He giggled and splashed water at Add. “Is this the merman you told me about, Lusa?” 

“Esper,” Lusa hissed. “You idiot, he’s not a merman!”

“Oops,” Esper laughed. 

Add groaned. 

**Author's Note:**

> Lusa is based on a blacktip reef shark and Esper is a type of angler fish.


End file.
